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New VCE VxRack designed to bring appliance simplicity to datacentre

EMC sees this as a new category of product, which provides the same benefits as hyperconverged appliances provide, but to the datacentre, where the appliances do not scale well.

LAS VEGAS — VCE has announced VxRack, a new family of hyper-converged RackScale Systems designed to dramatically simplify the deployment of next generation scale out mobile, cloud and distributed Tier Two applications.

“We got into the converged infrastructure game five years ago, and we’ve been very successful,” said Jonathan Martin, EMC’s Chief Marketing Officer. “People’s expectations and use cases have continued to evolve, which led us to introduce a new product, VSPEX Blue, based on EVO:RAIL as an appliance offering. Customers said they like this, but they want the simplicity of VSPEX Blue and an appliance on a datacentre scale. That’s VxRack. It focuses on bringing a lot of the simplicity of an appliance approach to converged infrastructure.”

David Goulding, CEO , EMC Information Infrastructure, said that this is an innovative category of product that solves the scalability limitations of hyperconverged appliances, which is where they have struggled.

“This is a new class of data centre scale-out hyperconverged systems, the first of this of this type of system.” Goulding said. The VxRack delivers massive scalability with the full VCE customer experience, and with EMC and VMware software,”

The VxRack system now provides an enterprise rack offering differentiated from vBlock’s blocks and the VSPEX appliances, and like them is a fully engineered system.

“The smallest VxRack configuration is a quarter sized rack, which scales to a maximum of 38 PB capacity and 240 million IOPS,” Martin said. “It is very much a data centre workload.”

David Goulding, CEO , EMC Information Infrastructure

While Martin said that he sincerely hoped everyone would want to use VMware vSphere as the hypervisor for this, he indicated that VxRack does support those other ones. He also indicated that it leverages EMC ScaleIO software-defined storage, and Cisco top of rack Nexus switching, and that it can optionally incorporate factory integration of the VMware vRealize management and orchestration suite.

“I’m really fired up about the VxRack,” said Praveen Akkiraju, CEO of VCE. “We’ve generated a lot of expertise over the last five years deploying engineered systems for data centres, and we have been able to leverage that for this.”

Akkiraju emphasized the flexibility of the system.

“It’s built on the hyperconverged building block, but you can get a compute intensive node or a storage intensive node, and can mix and match these in the rack,” he said. “You can have a quarter rack, half rack, full rack and if you want to you, you could build it out to thousands of racks. This is really scale out. We’ve really thought this through in terms of enabling a scale out system. This is not something you will have to engineer yourself.”

He also emphasized the importance of flexible networking to the solution as well as flexible compute and flexible storage.

“Networking is fundamentally contemplated as part of the VxRack,” he said. “You can’t really scale up unless you build in networking.”

Akkiraju said the best use case of the VxRack is the kind of workloads that have run on hyperconverged appliances, but which would benefit from scale-out capacity.

“Think of this for tier two workloads that take advantage of hyperconverged systems, as opposed to Tier 1 workloads like an ERP system that would run on a vBlock,” he said.

Praveen Akkiraju, CEO of VCE

Akkiraju said that different versions of the VxRack will soon be available.

“In August, we will announce a second version, optimized for VMware and based on EVO:RAIL,” he said. “Going forward we expect to launch other new versions of this.”

VxRack Systems will be orderable in July and will begin shipping in Q3.